Bitter Recipe, New To Forum

[KingBrianI]

Hi fellow homebrewers! I'm a Yank who's new to this forum though not to homebrewing. I've a great love for English Bitters (and in fact English ales of all types) but can't quite seem to replicate them adequately in my homebrews. A trip to England and Scotland a couple years ago instilled in me a deep desire for real ale that I can't come close to quenching here in the US. Somehow, I can never get that beautiful maltiness in my bitters that is so prevalent in your fine ales. So I've come to this forum and been reading diligently in hopes of coming up with a solution. Here's where I am so far. Kindly take a look and let me know if it seems on target. (I've Anglicised the units of measurement to better appeal to your sensibilities! )

OG 1.042
EBU (IBU) 30
SRM 8

3400 g Crisps Maris Otter
230 g Thomas Fawcett Carastan (34L)
50 g Crisps Pale Chocolate Malt (For color, I love a deep golden bitter)

mash @ 65.5 C for 90 min

15 g Northern Brewer @ 90 min
14 g Fuggles @ 90 min
20 g Kent Goldings @ 15 min

Whirlfloc and yeast nutrient @ 10 min

WLP005 with 1 L starter

I hope that does the trick. Good English bitters are $5-6/bottle over here, and even then they are frequently ill-kept. I think many of my previous attempts have had too-large additions of late hops, essentially covering the maltiness I crave. This will also be my first time using WLP005, though I've used s-04, WLP002/WY1968, the Wyeast Yorkshire Square yeast and the Wyeast Thames Valley I and II strains to varying degrees of success. My water is relatively soft so I've been adjusting the profile according to John Palmer's water spreadsheet, but for this one I'm going to go with the Bitter water profile as listed on Graham Wheeler's water calculator (BTW, I've bought Graham's book but it's still in the post). So, how's it look? And thanks for helping out a Yank!

[dave-o]

Dark Crystal and Munich are great for maltiness (although obviously traditional British ales don't have Munich in them!)

Recipe looks good - can't beat fuggles and EKG.

[RichardG]

Second dave-o's comments. The recipe looks fine, though I obviously don't know how your particular taste works. Like the hop schedule; fuggles & EKG are a great combination. From a purely personal point of view I'd probably chuck some fuggles in late as well, but as I say, that's just my preference and the recipe you've got looks great and should work fine. Good luck with it!

[oblivious]

Recipe looks great as is, best of look with the brew

[Invalid Stout]

Dark Crystal and Munich are great for maltiness (although obviously traditional British ales don't have Munich in them!)

I don't know about crystal, toffeeishness isn't the same thing as maltiness in my book.

[coatesg]

I agree - dark crystal has a toffee caramel kind of flavour rather than maltiness. (It's very good though).

The WLP005 will work very well here - I'd be tempted to up the IBUs to 35, but that's much a personal taste. Perhaps mash a little higher too - 67C or so - but really, the recipe looks good to me.

[KingBrianI]

Thanks for all the suggestions! I can't wait to pour a pint of this beer and be transported back to those UK pubs.

[KingBrianI]

I thought I would update this thread with a progress report. In short, I'm much closer to my goal! The above recipe produces a wonderful bitter. I made the above recipe exactly as written, and shortly after, I made the recipe again but with the 15 minute hop addition moved to a 15 minute steep at 80C, with an appropriate increase in the bittering charge to get the same IBUs.

The wlp005 worked great, I love the flavors it produces and that got me closer to the beer I wanted than anything else. I do have a problem with it stopping at 1.015 despite repeated rousings. I may try a semi-open fermentation for the next batch as I've heard that can help this strain.

The flavor is great on both beers, but I defintely prefer the second iteration, but I'll get to the hops later. That maltiness I was looking for really made an appearance here. Light toffee/butterscotch flavors really shine and are exactly what I'm looking for. The hop bitterness is just right and the hops round out the flavor. And the wonderful ringwood esters pull everything together.

Now on to the hops. The first recipe, with 20g of Goldings at 15 minutes, has a strongish hop flavor that competes somewhat with the malt flavors. Hop aroma for that recipe is very slight. The second recipe, with the 20g Goldings being steeped post-boil, has a much smoother hop flavor that complements, rather than competes, with the malt. It also has a wonderful floral hop aroma that plays well with the esters and toffee aromas. It is definitely the one I prefer.

I'm going to keep brewing variations of this recipe until I've matched it to my tastes completely. Changes I would like to make in the future are:

1. Get it to dry out to 1.010 or so. To do that I'll play with semi-open fermentation as I mentioned above. Please note I'm pitching large, healthy starters, oxygenating for 2 minutes with pure oxygen through a stone, adding nutrient to the boil, etc. so the under-attenuation is not that. If the open fermentation doesn't work, I'll substitute a bit of brown sugar for the base malt (which should help with change 2).

2. I'd like it to be a bit darker. Right now it's a beautiful vibrant gold, but I think I would like a bit more richness to the color. Something that makes you expect the great toffeish flavors before trying it. The brown sugar listed above would probably help a little, but I may need to increase the pale chocolate slightly, perhaps even to 100g. I'm not detecting it much in the flavor now, though if I compared the beer to the same recipe without the pale chocolate, it would probably become evident.

3. Get more of the ringwood character into the final beer. I found that during active fermentation and early gravity tests, the ringwood character came through strongly. After several rousings and sitting on the yeast cake after fermentation, the flavors seemed to "clean up" a bit. Hopefully I'll get the beer to attenuate quickly next time so I can get it off the yeast before it cleans up too much. I like a little diacetyl in this recipe.

So that's where we are. I'll post a picture soon and continue to update the thread as I progress with this project.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that the first recipe used Crisp MO and the second used Thomas Fawcett. I'll have to compare the two back to back a little more to try to pull out the differences.